I am looking for a way to use headless chrome similar to what chromeless does but instead of being implemented as a nodejs endpoint, allowing restful requests with the html content as a payload.
I want to run this service on aws lambda being triggered through API Gateway. Does anyone have experience with this usecase?
There's nothing keeping you from using Chromeless in your use-case. Chromeless can be used within an AWS Lambda function. You can take a (RESTful) request coming from AWS API Gateway and then do something with it and Chromeless. You can combine the @serverless-chrome/lambda package with Chromeless to get headless Chrome running within Lambda so that Chrome is available to Chromeless. The Chromeless Proxy works in a similar way. For example, your Lambda function's code might look like (this is untested code I just cobbled together, but should convey the idea):
const launchChrome = require('@serverless-chrome/lambda')
const Chromeless = require('chromeless').Chromeless
module.exports.handler = function handler (event, context, callback) {
const body = JSON.parse(event.body) // event.body coming from API Gateway
const url = body.url
const evaluateJs = body.evaluateJs
launchChrome({
flags: ['--window-size=1280x1696', '--hide-scrollbars'],
})
.then((chrome) => {
// Chrome is now running on localhost:9222
const chromeless = new Chromeless({
launchChrome: false,
})
chromeless
.goto(url)
.wait('body')
.evaluate(() => `
// this will be executed in headless chrome
${evaluateJs}
`)
.then((result) => {
chromeless
.end()
.then(chrome.kill) // https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome/issues/41#issuecomment-317989508
.then(() => {
callback(null, {
statusCode: 200,
body: JSON.stringify({ result })
})
})
})
.catch(callback)
})
.catch((error) => {
// Chrome didn't launch correctly
callback(error)
})
}
You'll find a similar thread on the Chromeless Issue tracker here.
Disclosure: I'm a collaborator/author of these packages.